


So Much More

by zombiesbecrazy



Category: Batman (Comics), Batman - All Media Types, Batman and Robin (Comics), Red Hood and the Outlaws (Comics)
Genre: Accidental Death, All of the bats are tea drinkers and you cannot convince my otherwise, Brothers, Damian is trying his best, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, Jason is a good brother, Maybe - Freeform, TW: Blood, accidents happen in the field, cameo by Dinah Lance
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-19
Updated: 2020-01-19
Packaged: 2021-02-24 21:29:27
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,297
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22324690
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/zombiesbecrazy/pseuds/zombiesbecrazy
Summary: Despite the no kill rule, sometimes accidents happen and Jason gets an unexpected visitor in the middle of the night and has to take control of a situation he wasn't expecting.
Relationships: Jason Todd & Damian Wayne
Comments: 38
Kudos: 555





	So Much More

**Author's Note:**

> Based on my headcanon that despite the No Kill rule, it is understood that accidents can happen.

Jason was brushing his teeth when he heard the tapping at his living room window, a soft but intentional sound, barely heard over the howl of the wind and the splattering of rain against the glass. It was a terrible night to be out on patrol, wet and windy and just down right miserable and Jason wasn’t surprised that one of the others was dropping in, either calling it a night or taking a short reprieve to warm up a smidge before heading back out. It happened more often than Jason really wanted, someone encroaching into his space unannounced, but he couldn’t deny that he liked the visits. The tap happened again, a little louder than the first time. It didn’t sound like Tim’s usual rhythm of knock when he dropped by and Dick had a habit of not knocking at all, simply slipping in and making himself at home whether he was invited in or not, so the list of usual suspects was dwindling fast.

Unlocking the window, Jason stuck his head out and spotted a familiar hooded figure sitting on his balcony, back curled against the wrought iron railing, looking small and chilled as the wind violently whipped through the alley.

There was a click of the tongue and the hood was pulled off in one motion of feigned dignity. “I need asylum.” A crack of lightening punctuated the statement and lit up the sky, only for a moment, but it was more than enough for Jason to see everything he needed to.

Damian was covered head to toe in blood. Unlike the rain pelting down, it was sticking to his uniform and no longer slick, clinging to him, threatening to never become clean and with a thick and dried smear on his cheek just below the edge of the mask. Bruises were blooming on his neck, large hands and fingers clearly marked as they had curled around his throat.

“Shit. Get in here.” Jason opened the window fully and stepped back as Damian stumbled through, tripping over the edge of the frame and into Jason’s conveniently positioned arms. Two deep but shaky breaths later Damian struggled to stand on his own, swaying a bit but shrugging off the hands hoping him up and taking a step out of reach. He pretended to ignore Jason and glared at the floor as if it has insulted his Father. Or Dick. “Are you okay, Kid?”

“I am unharmed,” sniped Damian but it lacked any sort of real bite, more of a reflexive reaction of a hurt animal growling when someone had time to help and Jason really didn’t have any patience for that sort of nonsense when said animal had shown up on his doorstep asking for help.

“Like hell you are. You look like you sliced an artery clean through.” His eyes flew over the smaller boy’s form, trying to suss out where the bleeding was coming from or where the worst of the damage was when Damian’s nostrils flared, only for a moment and it would have been easily missed if someone wasn’t paying close attention, but it was his version of flinching back violently after being burned, hand blistered and scalding after touching a stove. Such a small motion but it told Jason everything that he needed to know; an artery had been sliced, but it hadn’t been one of Damian’s own. “Oh.” Jason took a step back into his space and crouched down in front of him, hands sliding down Damian’s arms, no longer looking for injuries but in order to grasp his hands and squeeze them gently. "Self defense based on the marks on your neck." Damian avoided his look but nodded, rest of his body remaining statue still on the floor with a tremble coursing through his veins that Jason could only feel through their joined hands. “It's okay. You're alright. Let’s get you cleaned up.”

He stood, dropping one of the hands but holding onto the other one tight, and led Damian through his bedroom and into the ensuite bathroom. They were silent as they worked together to remove the Robin armor, greens and yellows stained by the red, and dropped it to the floor piece by piece until Damian was only wearing the base layer. Jason worked against the edge of Damian’s mask with delicate fingers, peeling the edges back with practices ease to minimize the pull against his skin. Once the mask was gone, Damian quickly reached up to rub his face, but not before the redness and puffiness were seen.

“Thank you. For letting me in. I cannot go back to the cave. Father will…” Damian’s voice was soft, but threatening to break apart with the smallest misstep, continuing to rub at his face. “I cannot go to the cave.”

“Never a problem. Why me though?” Jason hadn’t asked, but it had been running through his mind. He understood the hesitation to go back to the cave better than anyone, especially in a situation such as this, but he still shouldn’t have been at the top of the list for the kid to come to for comfort or help or whatever this was. He wouldn’t have even put himself in the top half of the list. “Why aren’t you on your way to Bludhaven?”

“Grayson would take me in but…” Damian’s eyes cast down, to his hands and rubbed them together roughly in a way that Jason was all too familiar with, trying to get rid of the feeling that they were still caked in blood despite his gloves now being in the pile on the floor. “Maybe later if I am needing a more permanent housing solution. For now I need…” his voice trailed off and he stared at the shower knobs.

Fascinating as his generic faucets were, Jason had a more pressing concern. “Do you need help with the evidence?” He really should have asked sooner. It really should have been the first question when Damian was out on the balcony, but now was better than never. “I get it. I’m the brother that will help you with disposal of a body.”

There was a small head shake. “I took care of it.”

“You sure?”

“I said it was taken care of, did I not?” snapped Damian, shoulders tensing in… something. Rage. Embarrassment. Guilt. Or a little bit of all three or perhaps something else entirely. “No. I just needed somewhere where I wouldn’t get that look, if only for a little while.”

“What look?”

“Disappointment.” Damian broke his stare-off with the shower, closed his eyes and let out a long breath in a clear attempt to try and centre himself. The gesture felt eerily familiar, like looking in a mirror from the wrong side and Jason was uncomfortable when he realised that Damian had pick up that particular routine from himself. “Whether Father yells or accepts it calmly, or if Grayson pretends like everything is fine or insists on comforting me, it is all the same. I let them down.” Damian turned slowly, craning up his neck to set his eyes on Jason, hard and cold and challenging him to be prove him wrong. “Even if tonight wasn’t intended, I am still just a murderer. It’s all I’ve ever been and all I ever shall be.” 

Hugging Damian when he wasn’t expecting it was always a risk, but knowing that all of his weapons were currently on the floor of the bathroom helped Jason make his decision. Hell, Jason would have done it anyway because he hadn’t even thought to consider it, just automatically dropping and wrapping his arms tight around him. “You aren’t ‘just’ anything, Kid. There is so much more to you than any blood on your hands.” Damian’s small body relax against him. It wasn’t a lot but it was enough. Jason massaged the back of Damian’s head softly and as he did, Damian returned the hug, hesitantly at first but then his arms were tight around Jason’s neck. “Maybe you are right and we can’t wash the red out, not completely, but that doesn’t mean that is all that we are.”

Damian’s head nodded against his shoulder and dropped his arms, breaking the hug. Jason turned away, giving Damian the illusion of the privacy that he knew the boy wanted to believe to be true after such a visible display of emotion, and turned on the shower, steam rising quickly against the cold air. “Need any help in the shower?” Jason knew what the answer would be, but he had to ask. As the Robin costume had been removed, Damian had become more unsteady, becoming less of a well trained machine and more like the child that he still was. Like all of them had been. Shaky and scared and more than a little out of his depth now that the adrenaline was wearing off in a familiar and secure environment.

“I’m not a child, Todd. I can shower unassisted.”

Jason nodded. “Towels are on the counter. I’ll look some clothes out on the bed for you. I’m going to make tea. Any preference?”

“I’m sure whatever you choose will be suitable.” The response did nothing to settle Jason mind though because it wasn’t like Damian to not have some sort of opinion on anything, even something as basic as tea. Especially when it came to tea. Jason went to leave the room when Damian's hand grasped around his wrist to stop him. "It was truly an accident, Todd. I threw him off of me and he sliced his throat on some abandoned machinery. I tried to stop the bleeding, but it was too fast and he was gone in seconds. I couldn't even call for assistance in time."

It was what it was. It wasn't something that they liked to talk about a lot, but accidents happened in their line of work and this was far from the first time that something like this had happened, but as far as Jason knew, this was the first time that it had happened to Damian and he had clearly panicked, as anyone would.

Accidents always felt a thousand times worse than something done with purpose.

"It's alright, Damian. I'll take care of it."

The bathroom door locked behind him and Jason leaned against it and sighed, running his hand through his hair and taking a moment to sort out his plan of action. He took three deep breaths to try and settle the twitching that had started beneath his skin, the want and need to go out and _do_ something rash, before pulling clothes out of Damian’s drawer for him, setting them on the bed and headed to the kitchen.

After starting the kettle, Jason opened his laptop and accessed the Batcomputer, logging into the tracker surveillance that followed where all of them went in their suits. It wasn’t something that was actively monitored on a regular night, only when something big was going down or if someone requested some back up, so Jason hoped that anything irregular wouldn’t have be noticed yet and narrowed down the filters to just watch the green dot indicating Damian’s trail, travel through the city at high speed. He had left the Manor at 8:37 and had seemed to be following patrol route C, a familiar one that followed a path through the western side of the city, far away from Crime Alley and the Ace Chemical, but still through neighbourhoods that tended to get ignored by the cops because they were not important enough to be protected but simultaneously not bad enough to have a regular presence. It was one of Tim’s favourites, but it wasn’t uncommon for Damian to take it.

It was when Damian’s tracker hit the farthest point of the route, at an old canning factory where a residential neighbourhood hit industrial, where things got interesting. Jason didn’t have any way to know what was going on because Damian hadn’t activated his mask cameras but from what he could deduce from the tracker staying fairly stationary, at least in the same building, for over an hour of time was that this is where whatever it was had gone down. He pulled up the health monitors, synced up the timeline and noticed that that Damian’s heart rate had risen, obviously showing that a fight had gone down, but then the heart rate had stayed high for far longer than it normally did and his respiration and cortisol readings were off the charts. Jason huffed in irritation because this was something that should have set off alarms in the cave, alerting someone that Damian was in trouble but it clearly hadn’t. 

It was then that he noticed that the alarms _had_ gone off and that Damian had used his comm to assure Alfred that he was fine and just winded after a hit to the chest. Alfred’s notes in the system had then had even said that Damian was going to go to Jason’s place instead of back to the manor to ‘take refuge from the storm’ and signed off.

It was smart and stupid and sneaky rolled up into a mess. He really should have told Alfred what had happened then and there, but he had clearly panicked instead and this is where they were now.

In the end, whatever had happened in the warehouse had been an accident and in self defense and the other person involved hadn't been an innocent bystander because Damian's reaction would have been much more extreme. It didn't make it better, but it could have been far worse. What he had to focus on was what to do about it now.

He wanted to trust Damian on the evidence situation, he really did, but the kid was rattled and not thinking straight and Jason couldn’t just leave it to chance. He couldn’t call Dick or Tim or Bruce. Not yet. What he needed was someone who could separate emotions in the moment see the bigger picture and help fix the problem rather than get upset by what was already done.

He pulled out his phone and called Barbara.

“Jason.”

“Red.” The kettle started to whistle on the stove and Jason stood up to remove it from the heat, pouring the water into the pot to steep. “I need a no questions asked kind of favour.”

“Why is that?” He could hear a something on in the background, some sort of sitcom based on the laugh track, and he could almost picture her curled up in her apartment because the two of them were the only ones with enough sense not to go out on a night like tonight unless absolutely necessary.

“You are doing terribly at this no questions asked thing,” he said, and she chuckled in response. “Please, Barbara? You know I wouldn’t if it wasn’t important. I need some old school Oracle magic.”

“Jason…”

“Help me, Barbie-wan Kenobi. You’re my only hope.” He could keep this light and fun, he could try and convince her that nothing was wrong and everything was fine. He could do this.

“You’re big nerd.”

“Takes one to know one.”

“Touché.” There was some tapping on the other end of the phone and he knew that she was on board. “What do you need?”

“Old warehouse on Vanderlei and Fifth. The cannery. I need to know if there is any evidence of something going on there tonight. Anything… messy.”

The tapping stopped and there was a pause and he knew that he had said too much to just slip by Barbara like that. “What did you do?”

“No. Questions. Asked, BG. And nothing. I’ve been a good boy and stayed in all night reading a book about evolutional linguistics for fun because, like you said, I’m a big nerd.” She was completely going to figure out what had happened.

The tapping started up again and within moments, Barbara hummed in the way that Jason already knew meant that she couldn’t tell him what he needed to know. “There’s no cameras there and all of the drones are assigned to other things tonight that I can’t redirect.” There was silence between them, Jason trying to think of what to do next when Barbara continued. “Would it be okay if I send Canary to check it out? She’s in the area on a stakeout that is about to wrap up.”

Jason considered his choices. He trusted Dinah and she wouldn’t ask a lot of questions about it, especially if the request came from Barbara, and it was a better option than doing nothing or leaving Damian in the apartment alone for him to go check it out by himself. It wasn’t ideal, but it was good enough until tomorrow. “That’s fine.”

“I can see that Robin’s tracker was there for quite a long time earlier tonight,” Barbara commented flatly and Jason was about to remind her again about what kind of favour this was when she cut him off at the bit. “That was an observation, not a question.”

“Thanks.”

“You’re welcome. And Jason?” Jason raised an eyebrow, forgetting that she couldn’t see him but it didn’t seem to matter because she probably already knew. “There seems to be something wrong with the trackers tonight and there is some glitching happening. I may have to scrub the system to reboot them properly. Some data might be lost.”

There was no way that she'd permanently delete it. She was simply buying him some time to get everything in line. It was her way of saying ‘ _I’m trusting you to look after this’_ and Jason had no way to repay her for it, but he’d try to think of something. “Night, Red.”

Jason was pouring the tea when Damian shuffled into the room and sat down at the counter, too big hoodie hanging past his hands and fluffy purple socks on his feet, making him look a lot younger than he already was. It wasn’t the shirt that Jason had taken out for him but he recognized it as one of Dick’s, which meant that Damian had gone hunting for it on purpose instead of putting on his own.

He understood Damian’s hesitation to go to Dick with this, but having Dick around would have been useful right now, as someone who knew the kid better or just as someone who was better in general at the whole comforting people thing than he was. Did Damian need to talk about it or did he want to ignore it? How much did Jason need to know? The who or why or how? Or did it matter?

“It’s peppermint oolong,” said Jason, immediately feeling stupid for not having anything better to say or any way to make any of this better.

“Smells good.” Damian took a sip and winced as he swallowed, the bruising around his throat and the unspoken strong choking that must have accompanied it for the bruises to be appearing so fast must have made it hurt to swallow, but he said nothing so Jason let it go. He was sure that there was more bruising and pain that Damian was hiding, but Jason was trusting him to manage it on his own or tell him if he needed medical attention. Minor physical damage was unimportant tonight.

As far as his brothers went, Damian was the one that Jason knew the least. He knew his background of course, and basic things like that he liked animals and that he was a talented artist, but there was so much that he didn’t know about Damian as a person and it left him a little bit in the dark about how to make him feel a little more at ease.

In the end, he decided that the best person that Jason could pretend to treat him like in this situation was Jason himself. He wouldn’t want to talk about it, at least not now. He’d want to process with a mild distraction in the background and just be by himself for a while, whether it be alone or not. He would want to feel quiet and safe and secure. He would want time to just _be_.

These were all things that he could do.

They each finished their cup of tea at the same time, Jason deposited both mugs in the sink and nodded towards the living room. “Come on, squirt.”

Jason walked slowly with Damian following closely behind, grabbed the remote, starting up episodes of Planet Earth and turned the volume down low. Damian settled down onto the couch, head on the pillows at one end and curling his body out so that his feet were just over half way across the middle and Jason draped a thick blanket over top of him before sitting at the other end. Damian’s socked feet dug into his leg and he could feel the cold from them seeping through despite the overly fluffy socks and hot shower, and he found himself tucking the blanket around them tighter, trying to keep the warmth wrapped around the younger boy. Damian’s attention turned to the TV, and Jason picked his book that he had abandoned earlier that night off the coffee table and picked up where he had left off, losing himself in _The Unfolding of Language_ all over again.

Twenty minutes in, his phone vibrated with a text, but it turned out not to be from Barbara but from Dinah herself.

_Queen Canary: O sent me to an abandoned warehouse that looked like it hadn’t been touched for months for absolutely no reason when I could have been home in my PJs and not freezing my ass off after the stakeout that would never end. I cussed her out but she said it’s your fault, so fuck you. You owe me a beer._

Jason sent back a thumbs up emoji and let out a sigh of relief that he didn’t realise that he had been holding in, and his hand was trembling as he put his phone back on the table. Owing Dinah a beer was a very small price to pay for what she had done for them, whether she knew it or not.

An episode and a half passed with just the background noise of the program before Damian shifted around and flopped down again, this time the other way around and using Jason’s thigh as a pillow, curling the blanket around him tighter. Jason set his book aside and watched the boy who was keeping his focus on the TV, but looking distracted and probably not paying a lot of attention to whatever David Attenborough was talking about on screen. Jason reached down and carefully carded his fingers through Damian’s soft hair, and watched as a single tear slide down his cheek, quickly followed by another and then some more, but neither of them said anything about it. Jason had always loved the feeling of hands in his hair, remembering when his mom did it when he was sick as a kid, and how Bruce had done it after Jason had woken up with nightmares or had been injured or sometimes just because, and it appeared that Damian felt the same way.

It made him curious is Talia had ever done this for Damian when he had been a child. He hoped so.

Thirty minutes later when the episode ended and blackness took over the screen with just a prompt to click on the next episode left, Damian spoke up. “I have to tell Father.” Not a question, just the acceptance of reality. He was quiet but resigned, tear stains on his cheek not leading to a crack in his voice. He was calmer than before, more relaxed after being given the time to decompress.

And maybe having a good cry helped a little bit.

“You do, but not tonight. Tonight you are going to stay here and watch nature documentaries and then in the morning I’ll make you breakfast before you head home.” He paused his fingers and Damian let out a barely audible whine at the lack of motion, so Jason started up again and Damian cuddled in further. “I can come with you if you want. Be there when you tell Bruce.” He was a good kid. Bruce was going to see that; his firm no kill rule had unspoken leniency for accidents which this clearly was. Jason knew that everything was going to work out fine and he was sure that deep down inside, Damian was sure of it too. That didn’t mean that it was any less scary, to tell someone of your mistakes and know that you disappointed them. The undercurrent of anxiety would never leave when it came to something like this.

Jason felt the small head nod against him. “Thank you. I appreciate it.”

“Want to keep going? The next episode has giant salamanders.”

Damian made a noise of assent, and Jason started it up again, this time choosing to watch instead of ignore it for his book. Waves crashed on the screen and Damian turned his head to look at Jason, locking his eyes on him, full of determination. “I hope you know that you are as well. What you said earlier. We are both more than just this one thing, brother.”

Hearing his own words back at him and the way that Damian had lumped the two of them into the same category made Jason’s heart soar in an unexpected way. It felt so good to know that he had been able to help in a way that was unrelated to his size and his violence. Maybe he had been the right person for Damian to come to with this. “That we are, Kid.”


End file.
